The origin of life

UNIVERSITY ALFONSO REYES

Preparatory Division

Linda Vista Drive

Subject: English

Teacher: Julio Cesar Trevino Manriquez

Topic
 The origin of life

Group: 6 "A"

Serial Number: L-10072

Student: Leslie Diana Rodriguez Garcia

Guadalupe, N.L. to July 23, 2012

The origin of life

Origin of life, a set of phenomena that have shaped the emergence of living things on Earth. The idea of ​​a unique process comes directly from the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, in which all living things descended from one ancestor.

For a long time, research the origins of life was just a discussion based on the metaphysical and religious beliefs. In fact, most religions teach that living things are created from scratch or an original chaos by a deity, a "hand" that creates and order.

The theory of spontaneous generation, according to which living things are born of the earth or other inert medium, spread in the Middle Ages and remained unchallenged until the seventeenth century.

It was necessary to wait to 1859, when he broke a noisy controversy that Louis Pasteur faced with a naturalist-Archimède Rouen named Felix Pouchet, in order to officially abandon the idea of ​​spontaneous generation. Pasteur, convinced that all living things, by tiny they were, came from 'germs' that floated in the air, made a series of experiments that led to the technique of sterilization of culture media, where all proceeds directly modern bacteriology.

The idea of ​​spontaneous generation was abandoned and, if not taken into consideration the creationist theories (which still have a number of supporters, especially in the U.S.), the problem was first posed in scientific terms as follows : how life appeared on Earth?

In the nineteenth century the idea that life had an extraterrestrial origin: meteorites that hit our planet would have deposited germs from another. In 1906, chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed the hypothesis that the germs had been carried by the light radiation. These theories were refuted some years later by Paul Becquerel, who noted that no living being could traverse space and withstand the harsh conditions prevailing in the vacuum (extremely low temperature, intense cosmic radiation, for example). Furthermore, these partial solutions do nothing but move the problem, then, even allowing for the extraterrestrial origin of life, would be to find out how it appeared on other planets.

The question of the origin of life did not begin to advance to the 1920's, when knowledge began to be clarified about the origin of the Earth.

Since the dawn of civilization man has wondered if life ever existed or had a beginning, if their origin was divine or was the product of a long process.

These criteria led scientists to consider many theories that attempt to answer this big question, as is the case for the theory of spontaneous generation, which states that "could arise complex animal and plant life, spontaneously from inert matter "which at the time, seemed as apparently indicated, as no technology had machines like the ones today are counted.

Pasteur who had to be refuted this view, with their experiments also proved that microorganisms arise from other microorganisms, which consists of two flasks gooseneck with beef broth, boiled them, and as I do not see anything after, short end of one of the flasks, decomposing, thanks to the idea of ​​spontaneous generation was banished completely from scientific thought.

Another attempt is the Creationist theory, which states that "the earth and every living thing that exists today comes from an act of creation by one or more divine beings, whose act was carried out according to a divine purpose." It is very likely that in the world there are thousands of people who accept this theory, the concepts

Unfounded from home, but also, there are those who do not share.

Dr. Richard Lewontin, Professor of Zoology Alexander Agassiz at Harvard University, puts it this way: "It's not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us accept a material explanation of the paranormal, but contrary, that our a priori adherence to material causes us to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations.

       

 Several ideas about the origin of life can be classified bacteria.